1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to apparatus for the automatic handling of comestible products and in particular to apparatus for the rapid transport of stacks of comestibles in loading and packaging operations or the like.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the commercial preparation of prepackaged, food products, such as luncheon meats and cheeses, machines are commonly employed for rapidly and automatically slicing, stacking, and weighing the food products. Machines are also available for automatically sealing and labeling packages containing the stacks of food products. At present, however, the stacks of food products are commonly loaded by hand into individual packages. The loading of the stacks by hand is not only slow, but also increases the possibility of contaminaton.
The automatic loading of food products into packages or the like is further complicated when stacks of presliced product are to be loaded. The stacks are often fragile and delicate and can be easily deformed or mutilated by rough handling during loading operations, which can result in an unsightly or improperly sealed, hence unacceptable, package. Because of the fragile nature of the stacks of sliced product, rigorous demands are made on precise positioning and aligning of the stacks for loading into the packages.
Furthermore, a typical packaging apparatus for presliced food products will include a plurality of side-by-side lines with stacks of product being packaged in side-by-side cavities or spaces. It is faster to load the several stacks into adjacent cavities or loading spaces for packaging, but simultaneous loading presents the additional problem of pre-arranging the stacks to fit the cavity or loading zones conveying the stacks to the cavities without disrupting the pre-arrangement, and performing the operation quickly, lest the advantage of simultaneous loading over sequential loading be lost.
A common obstacle to increased speed of operation is the increasing tendency of stacks of luncheon meat and the like to pokerchip, i.e., to become lopsided or skewed in the manner of a stack of pokerchips, when undergoing more and more rapid accelerations and decelerations as the speed of operation is increased. Pokerchipping results in the delicate stacks becoming mutilated or edges being torn from individual slices as the food is handled further by the apparatus, hence, it cannot be tolerated. Although present in any food-stack handling operation, the problem of pokerchipping is particularly acute in the typical loading operation, in which the stacks undergo many rapid movements as they are separated, sorted, aligned, transported, and finally inserted into packages.
Prior attempts to solve these problems, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,893,282 and 4,048,784, have met with only limited success and acceptance.